PLSC 118: The Moral Foundations of Politics

Lecture 18

 - The "Political-not-Metaphysical" Legacy

Overview

The mature Rawls departed quite a bit from his earlier theory of justice, choosing instead an overlapping consensus, or political, not metaphysical approach. Professor Shapiro argues that this is a significant departure from the Enlightenment tradition. In a wrap-up of the class’s examination of the Enlightenment, Professor Shapiro charts its evolution from Locke to Bentham to Mill to Marx to contemporary theorists. As for the Enlightenment commitment to science and reason as the basis for politics, the early Enlightenment identified science with certainty, while the mature Enlightenment beginning with Mill emphasized the fallibility of science. But how rational are individuals after all? As for the second Enlightenment normative ideal of individual rights, the efforts to secularize the workmanship ideal after Locke were very problematic, culminating in the numerous and sound critiques of Marx and the intuitively disturbing radicalism of Rawls’s moral arbitrariness. Professor Shapiro then introduces the backlash of the at-times unsatisfying consequences of the Enlightenment tradition, the anti-Enlightenment.

 
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PLSC 118 - Lecture 18 - The "Political-not-Metaphysical" Legacy

Chapter 1. Introduction: Recap and Class Agenda [00:00:00]

Professor Ian Shapiro: Okay, so our task today is to finish up teaching about Rawls, and then I’m going to take a step back and look at where we’ve gotten to so far in today’s course, because we’re really entering a transition moment from the Enlightenment to the anti-Enlightenment, which is what we’ll begin with on Wednesday.

So just to recap briefly, we had been talking about Rawls’s two principles of justice which were really three principles of justice, one for the distribution of liberties, which was his most expansive system compatible with the like liberty for all. One was the principal of equality of opportunity which is 2b in his lexical ranking, which for some reason known only to John Rawls comes before 2a, and the third one was 2a, this so called difference principle, or what used to be called in welfare economics the maximin principle, which says maximize the minimum share.

And I had explained to you why Rawls thinks the standpoint of justice is the standpoint of the most adversely affected, which is not a bleeding heart idea but rather this universalizable idea, this notion that if you can affirm a principle, even from the standpoint of those people who are most adversely affected by it, you’ll affirm it from every other conceivable standpoint as well. And so this translated into these L-shaped indifference curves per if we start with a distribution like that anywhere in this area would be preferred because all Rawls is interested in is maximizing that distance. That is the size of the share at the bottom. He’s indifferent to who has that share. So that, say, a move from X to F over here would be an improvement for Rawls even though it’s clearly a massive loss to A and a huge gain to B. He’s not interested in that. The point is that the distance from the axis to F is greater here than the distance from the axis to X is there and that’s the only relevant consideration.

Now sometimes Rawls is called an egalitarian, and as I began to point out to you at the end of Wednesday’s lecture, that’s really misleading. His principle is rather very underdetermined. That is to say if we compare it with the Pareto principle it completely contains within it the Pareto principle. So that if somebody came along and said, “Well, the best way to benefit the people at the bottom is to have markets — trickle down let’s say that the pie will grow the most and the people at the bottom will benefit the most from a pure market system — Rawls would say, “Fine,” because everything that is Pareto superior is also Rawls preferred. On the other hand, if somebody came and made the case that heavy state intervention to redistribute would in fact work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged then he would agree with that as well. And so you can conjure up egalitarian results that are compatible with the Rawlsian scheme, or anti-egalitarian results.

A further consideration comes in here when we stop just talking about the worst-off individual because you can start to think about, well, what happens if you get a small marginal increment for the person at the bottom paid for by massive cuts on the middle class and perhaps big benefits to the very wealthy. And I mentioned the example of the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s which had that structure. Rawls would have no objection to that either even though from an egalitarian perspective that would look like a regressive redistribution from the status quo in 1980.

So it’s a very underdetermined principle. It’s not necessarily egalitarian or necessarily anti-egalitarian. All it says is, “Arrange things to the greatest benefit of the person at the bottom.” And as I think I mentioned to you, Rawls took a lot of criticism in the 1970s and 1980s from people who would plow all the way through to page 300 and whatever it is in his book to learn that Rawls says he’s agnostic between capitalism and socialism. And people say, “Well, to read 300 pages of a book about justice and discover the author is agnostic between the two main political economic systems of the twentieth century isn’t exactly satisfying.”

But Rawls’s answer, as I said, is which type of political economic system actually operates to the benefit of the person at the bottom is not a question for political theorists. That’s a question maybe for a political economist, maybe for trial and error through policy innovation. It’s going to have to get hammered out in the real world of practical political economy. And so it’s not a critique of the Rawlsian standard. It’s underdetermined with respect to the choice of actual political economic systems. And I think that Rawls is on relatively firm ground there. We wouldn’t want to think that what political economy is the most efficient from the standpoint of benefiting people at the bottom is really a philosophical question when clearly it is not.

So that’s the Rawlsian story. I gave you the big picture at the beginning: his general conception of distributive justice, and then these more specific principles that get added in the course of trying to figure out how the general conception of justice can actually be applied.

Chapter 2. Course Recap [00:07:05]

Now I want to take a step back. I’m going to come back to Rawls a little bit later, but I want to take a step back first and think about where we’ve come from. And then we’ll see how Rawls leads us to think about where we’ve gotten to.

We started out this course by talking about Enlightenment political theory. The Enlightenment being a philosophical movement that really starts in the seventeenth century but gathers steam in the eighteenth century, and I said that from the point of view of political arrangements, there were really two core values of the Enlightenment. One was a commitment to the idea of individual freedom as realized through a doctrine of individual rights as the most important value in politics, and the second was a commitment to science, reason and science as the basis of politics rather than things that had prevailed hither to such as natural law, or tradition, or natural rights, or religious argument. That rather the move, which we saw so dramatically with Bentham but has been present in one way or another with everybody we’ve looked at, the move is to say, “No, we’re not going to appeal to tradition. We’re not going to appeal to religion. We’re not going to appeal to natural law, natural rights. We’re going to appeal to the idea of science, science understood through reason.”

And so those are the two twin ideas which one way or another have shaped every single theorist that we’ve looked at. So starting with the commitment to science, remember those early Enlightenment theorists were very different from modern Enlightenment thinkers in that they identified science with certainty. Remember the Cartesian idea that you have certainty about the contents of your own mind, or Locke’s point that only we have that kind of privileged access into the contents of our own soul. Remember his famous line to the effect that true and lasting conviction requires inward persuasion of the mind and that can’t be forced on anybody by the magistrate or anybody else; that this internal certainty is so important.

And for Hobbes we saw that knowledge has its basis in willing things. So we got this rather curious result that he said, “The laws of geometry have the force of laws because they’re the product of wills. We make the triangle, if you like, and the laws of politics were like the laws of geometry because we make the commonwealth in the same way that we make the triangle,” and that therefore in the early Enlightenment there was this enormous emphasis on certainty as the hallmark of science.

But then we saw, as we moved into the mature Enlightenment with people like John Stuart Mill, that actually they had a very different view of science. That the hallmark of science was fallibilism, that everything we think we know is subject to doubt. There isn’t anything in our reasoning about the real world that meets the Cartesian criterion of being impossible to doubt. What we think we know is always revisable in the light of more evidence and better scientific investigation.

And Mill’s defense of the marketplace of ideas, and of competition, and argument was precisely to encourage that. And so the long chapter on freedom of thought and action in On Liberty is really about — remember how we get from freedom to utility via a system that allows the truth to come out, mainly a system in which ideas have to confront contrarian ideas in the marketplace of public speech, and that science is really a process which makes it possible, or more possible than any other process, for us to approximate the truth, but that’s something very different from having this notion of certainty. So the commitment to science becomes the commitment to fallibilism, and the commitment to a system which has room in it for experimental searching after the truth as a perpetual feature of human social association.

Now when we look at Rawls and Nozick, and the social contract theorists, we find at least in some respects a sort of throwback to the early Enlightenment, at least in the Nozick and the Rawls that we’ve talked about to date. That is to say, they are looking for a unique answer to the question, “What principles would people agree upon if they were designing society afresh?” And this hypothetical social contract, so called, depends on the idea that there’s a unique answer to that question, right? So they can see that there never was a social contract, but they say, “Suppose we were designing the rules from scratch? What rules would we design?” even though no society was ever created in that way.

And the thought was, “Well, if there’s an answer to that question, if there’s a definitive answer to that question, then we have a standard, a yardstick for measuring actual institutional arrangements.” That is to say, societies that come closer to that standard can be judged better than societies that are further from it. And as societies evolve over time, if they evolve toward it they’ll be improving, and if they evolved away from it they would be getting worse. So this was the Kantian, or what I called neo-Kantian aspiration to come up with a standard which any rational person must, on reflection, affirm. And if you can say what that is, then you have your yardstick by reference to which you can look at actual political and social arrangements.

And it might be worth pausing just for a second to notice that Immanuel Kant himself, who we didn’t read in this course so you’ll have to just take it on faith from me — Kant himself was deeply skeptical that that could be done because he thought that social and political arrangements are inevitably dependent on empirical considerations and you’re not going to get the universal laws about those things. So Kant himself would have been skeptical of the Rawlsian project. He would have said, “You’re not going to be able to get empirical propositions about the organization of society that are going to rise to this level of a categorical imperative.”

And I think that one implication of our discussion of Rawls is that Kant was, in fact, right. For example, Rawls’s story about protecting the position of the person at the bottom assumes an enormous degree of risk aversion. Now he had an answer for why. He said, “Well, there’s no necessary relationship between the level of economic development and the fortunes of the person at the bottom,” so you had that grave risk assumption. But we saw that even that becomes problematic if you think about very marginal improvements in the condition of the person at the bottom coming at enormous costs for the person a little bit higher up. It’s not at all clear that the rational thing to do would be always to, at no matter what cost, to preserve the condition of the person at the bottom.

The important article about this published by John Harsanyi in 1975 argues that if you really think that people have a rational view of risk, it would make more sense to choose utilitarianism behind the veil of ignorance than it would make to choose the Rawlsian commitment to maximizing the position of the person at the bottom.

Now it’s not obvious that Harsanyi is right, but nor is it obvious that Rawls is right. And once you make that admission, then you no longer have a unique answer. You say, “Well, we plug one set of psychological assumptions in about risk and we get Rawls. We plug a different set of assumptions in about risk and we get Harsanyi,” and so it’s all being driven by the assumptions about human psychology that we plug into the model. And, of course, once you recognize that then you don’t have a unique answer.

Another way of putting it is that the young Rawls was rather naïve about what is uncontroversial in economics, psychology and sociology. That is, Rawls made a distinction between the laws of psychology and economics, as he put them, which we do have knowledge of behind the veil of ignorance and which he was treating as uncontroversial, and then the specific knowledge that we have about our particular life plans, goals and so on which he kept hidden from us. But it turns out that there are very few uncontroversial assumptions about human psychology or economics, and so you can’t get unique answers.

And indeed, if we only restrict ourselves to economics one of the most interesting developments in economics of the past decade is precisely the turn away from standard economistic assumptions into the field of psychology to see how preferences are formed, why people have the risk profiles that they do and so on. And much of modern behavioral economics regards as subjects for study rather than axiomatic assumptions, the source of things Rawls wanted to work with. So there isn’t a unique answer.

Chapter 3. Political, Not Metaphysical [00:18:49]

Now as it turns out as Rawls became older he realized that this neo-Kantian venture was built upon a hill of sand, and that he wasn’t going to be able to make Kant’s ethics do the work in social contract theory that traditionally had been done by natural law for the reason that I just gave you. You’re not going to actually be able to get unique results out of it.

And so the mature Rawls made a different kind of move, which in some ways is an even bigger retreat from the early Enlightenment than was Mills retreat to fallibilism, and that is the move that comes under the heading of “political, not metaphysical.” And that’s the name of the subtitle of the article I had you reading about for today.

And so here’s the intuition. It’s counterintuitive until you think it through, but then I think it’s actually quite a powerful intuition. And I’m going to explain it to you actually not by reference to Rawls, but by another person called Cass Sunstein who’s a lawyer at the University of Chicago. You might hear a lot about him because he’s on the long short list for Obama picks for the Supreme Court. So Cass Sunstein might be in the news. Stay tuned.

But Sunstein had a different slogan; not “political, not metaphysical,” but rather what he called a theory of incompletely theorized agreement. This is not an elegant term, but let me give you the intuition here. We often think, when we think about political disagreement, we often think, well, people can agree on very general things and the devil is in the details. People can agree that freedom is good, but they can’t agree on what is actually required for freedom when you get down to brass tacks of arguing about policies. Does freedom require people have universal healthcare? Some people say yes. Some people say no, right? So one view of political disagreement is we can agree at a very high altitude, but then when you start to get into the dirty particulars of everyday life then we can’t agree.

Sunstein and Rawls in his political-not-metaphysical mode have the almost opposite intuition to that. And so here the sort of example would be, well, think about a faculty in a university trying to decide whether or not a junior person should get tenure. They might be able to agree that the person should get tenure without being able to agree in a million years about why the person should get tenure, or when we think of Congress passing a piece of legislation, when we think of Congress passing the healthcare bill that just went through, warts and all, through the House. You get the votes, but if those people had to agree upon why they were voting for it they couldn’t agree in a million years. They all have different reasons for why they’re voting for it or why they’re voting against, it for that matter, right?

So the notion of incompletely theorized agreement is, “You know what? We don’t care.” We don’t care, or Rawls’s idea of “political, not metaphysical.” The question is, what political arrangements would people with very different values, commitments, worldviews, metaphysical systems, what would they agree on? What would be, to use another one of Rawls’s terms, what would be the overlapping consensus? Think of sort of a big Venn diagram where you’ve got a lot of circles mostly not overlapping, but they all overlap in one area. That’s the overlapping consensus, okay?

And we don’t care about the parts that don’t overlap. So it’s much less rationalistically ambitious because now if you think back to the first principle we don’t have to say that the fundamentalist would agree that she or he has more freedom in a disestablished church regime than the non-fundamentalist would have in the fundamentalist regime. All we have to say is that the fundamentalist accepts this. We don’t know why. We don’t care why. So that’s the notion of incompletely theorized agreement, or political, not metaphysical. We’re just going to look for what is the overlapping consensus for people with very different worldviews, metaphysical systems, beliefs, et cetera.

Okay, and so another way you can think about this is, instead of saying, “First I’m going to convince you of my metaphysics, and my epistemology, and my theory of science, and then when I’ve persuaded you about all of those things I’m going to show you how my political theory follows.” On the Sunstein or mature Rawls view that’s a mug’s game. You’re never going to do it because people are never going to agree about all of those things. And more important for politics we don’t need them to agree about all of those things. All we need to do is find the overlapping consensus that they will affirm. So they might affirm a series of political arrangements, institutions, for very different reasons from one another, and it doesn’t matter. We don’t need it to be any more robust than that.

And so that’s where the mature Rawls winds up. And as we’ll see in the final lectures of this course there is a certain democratic element to this, but it’s under-theorized in Rawls. And the analogy I’ll just mention and I’ll come back to it later in the course is — the analogy is the secret ballot. We don’t require people to give reasons for the way in which they vote. They can have reasons for choosing the same candidate as we choose that we would regard as completely idiotic. We don’t care, right? So the political-not-metaphysical move; or the incompletely theorized agreement move is analogous to the idea of the secret ballot in that we become much less demanding. People don’t have to have good reasons for voting the way they do. Their reasons are their private business, okay?

And so the political-not-metaphysical move builds on that kind of intuition, and obviously it’s a huge retreat from the original Enlightenment motivation to get principles that must follow scientifically for any clearheaded-thinking person. So the mature Rawls is a kind of extreme retreat, you might say. Even though the young Rawls is an Enlightenment thinker with all the zeal of a Jeremy Bentham, the mature Rawls really gives up on the Enlightenment project. And, of course, you then get into the question — he still thinks his three principles would be affirmed. He thinks these three principles are part of this overlapping consensus, but he has no way of knowing that that, in fact, is true. It’s just an assertion that it’s true and it’s not necessarily the case.

So what I’m going to suggest to you in later lectures is that Rawls actually retreats too far from the Enlightenment project, and that there’s a way of thinking about the mature Enlightenment that’s consistent with a democratic political outlook that doesn’t give up so completely as the political-not-metaphysical view does on the Enlightenment project, but that’s for the future.

Chapter 4. The Normative Idea of Individual Rights [00:28:35]

Let’s first focus on the other element of the Enlightenment. I said the one was this commitment to science and we’ve seen how that played out now from the seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, and this affirmation, but this gradual retreat from certainty that marked the march from the early Enlightenment thinkers through Mill to Rawls, Sunstein and others.

But now let’s focus on the idea, the normative idea of individual rights. Remember we said that the summum bonum, the most important value of the Enlightenment is this idea of individual freedom recognized or institutionalized by a doctrine of individual rights. The rights of the individual are somehow sacrosanct.

And we saw that in the early Enlightenment, this had a theological basis. Remember I said to you that Locke was tormented by the theological controversy between the two sides, some of whom said God is omnipotent, but if you said God is omnipotent, that seemed to undermine the idea that the laws of nature could be timeless, because if God is omnipotent he could decide to change them tomorrow. So either God is omnipotent or the laws of nature are timeless, but not both, and he wrestled with that. If you go and read his essays on the law of nature published in 1660 you see him really tormenting himself.

But at the end of his life he comes down firmly on what we call the will-based theory, the idea that something can’t be a law unless it’s a product of a will. And so we’ll go with the omnipotence and let the omniscience fall by — and let the universalism fall by the wayside. And so that was the idea of God owns his creation because he made it, and God knows his creation because he made it, and then the move Locke makes is that God gave us the capacity to make things for ourselves. We become, as he called it, miniature gods. That so long as we act within the constraints of the law of nature we can behave in our realm in a way that’s an analogy of the way God behaves in his realm. We could create things over which we have maker’s knowledge just as God created maker’s knowledge and rights of proprietorship over his creation, this idea that we’re miniature Gods.

And then we saw what happened to that idea. We called it the workmanship model. We saw what happened to it over the course of the next several centuries. And particularly we saw that beginning with Marx what you get is an attempt to secularize the workmanship idea. That is to say, to cut it loose from its theological moorings, but still affirm the basic structure of the idea that making confers ownership.

And we saw that Marx’s version of that ran into trouble because he wanted to say only the worker makes things when in fact we saw the capitalist also contributes to the value of things. And then we looked at the feminist critique of Marx which was, “Well yes, and the stay-at-home spouse contributes to the value of what the worker makes,” and indeed even perhaps the Sunday school teacher who drummed the work ethic into the worker contributes to the value of what the worker makes, and so on. So that if you have this idea that making confers ownership you’re going to get a complicated web of overlapping and indecipherable entitlements, not any clean argument of the sort that Marx’s theory of exploitation aspired to be. And so we saw that if you look at the Marxist tradition they eventually give up on all of that. People like John Roemer, and Jon Elster, and Jerry Cohen, and instead just turn — they give up on the idea of workmanship and turn to arguments about power.

But most people wouldn’t find that entirely satisfying because most people do want, at some level, to link what we get to what we do. Even if the notion of workmanship is problematic, most people don’t want to give it up entirely. And I think you see this very dramatically with Rawls, because Rawls takes the idea of workmanship apart in a hardheaded way that nobody before him ever did.

And this is the debate I was referring to last Wednesday about nature and nurture and moral arbitrariness. Just to remind you, there’s this huge debate. It’s gone on for 150 years. Are the differences between us the result of nature or are they the result of nurture? And Rawls makes the point, “You know what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference because in either case these differences are morally arbitrary,” right? Remember this? Yeah. So whether I’m a good athlete because of my genes or whether I’m a good athlete because of the way I was raised is immaterial. I did nothing to have certain genes or to be raised in a certain way, and I didn’t even make choices that led to those results. So any benefits I get are morally arbitrary. That was the notion that Rawls brought to bear.

But then the question is, “Well, why should anyone be entitled to what they make?” And Rawls is really pushed in the direction of a kind of socialization of capacities strategy, as I call it in that piece that I had you read. But it’s very unsatisfying because if I spent five years writing a book and you come along and say, “Well, you’re not entitled to that book. You don’t have any special claim on the capacities,” I’m going to get really mad. “I worked really hard on that. I want it. It’s mine. Who are you to take it away?” So even if you can’t give a good philosophical defense of this workmanship ideal, people are deeply unwilling to let go of it. Indeed, so is Rawls deeply unwilling to let go of it.

So Rawls, and we walked through this on Wednesday but I’ll just remind you of it again, Rawls makes a distinction between the capacities that we have and the use we choose to make of those capacities. But that’s not very — the notion was so if we both have the same IQ, but one of us chooses to work and the other chooses to sit on the couch watching ESPN, the one who works should get more because they chose to work. And the person who sits on the couch should get less because they chose not to work.

But that doesn’t really work for Rawls because once you’ve made the move into this land of moral arbitrariness the differences in weakness of the will are themselves distributed in morally arbitrary ways. So perhaps the person who works all day had the work ethic drummed into them a mile-a-minute by some Sunday school teacher or very involved parent, whereas the one who winds up sitting on the couch all day didn’t. Their father was off stoned all day or something when they were supposed to be being taught the work ethic. Well, if the capacities themselves are morally arbitrary then the differences in the capacity to use the capacities, so you can get, obviously, an infinite regress.

So Rawls tries to kind of build a moat around this implication of his argument, but it doesn’t work. And if we had time to talk about other theorists in this tradition, you’d find the same thing. I’ll just mention the example of Ronald Dworkin, whom also like Rawls has a resourcist view and also like Rawls sees that the differences between us are morally arbitrary, which they are. And he says, “Well, we should make a distinction between what he calls material resources people have (which is sort of like Rawlsian primary goods) and physical and mental powers. And we should treat the differences in material resources as morally arbitrary, but not the differences in physical and mental powers.”

But, again, you have to come back and say, “Why not?” He says, “Well, we couldn’t redistribute them,” but actually that’s not true. For instance, think about blind people. You could have a system which said, “Well, if some people are blind we have to compensate them for their blindness because they have a morally arbitrary disadvantage,” right? Or, indeed, if you really wanted to be brutal about it, but it’s nothing in the logic of what Dworkin’s saying rules it out; we should just blind all the sighted people, right? Maybe the technology — we get forcible eye transplants. It’s not a path people are going to want to go down, right? It’s not a path people are going to want to go down, but it’s hard to see why not, right? It’s hard to see why not once you take this idea of moral arbitrariness seriously. 

So two points to make about that. We go back to the very beginning. This was never a problem for Locke, right? And we should remember that because, after all, all of this comes from Locke, this workmanship model comes from Locke. Why is it not a problem for Locke? Because for Locke, if we have differences in capacities, it must have been God’s plan, right? Remember Locke’s story is human beings are God’s creation. Human beings do not create other human beings. He’s very clear about this in his discussion of parental rights. We don’t own our children in the way that we own our property because we don’t create children. God creates children and he implants in human beings the urge to reproduce, but we don’t fashion the child. We can’t create a child in an architectural sense, and most importantly, of course for Locke, we don’t put the soul in the child.

So God does all of that. So children are God’s property and parents are fiduciary. So we don’t own our children. So if it turns out that some of us are smarter than others, or some of us are more hardworking than others, and some of us are better athletes than others, we don’t have to — there’s no moral imperative for us to have some account of why those differences exist because they’re not products of human action. They’re products of the divine choice.

So in the Lockean story this isn’t a problem, but the minute you secularize the workmanship ideal, this issue arises. Why is it that some people should get more than others just because of morally arbitrary characteristics? And the ways in which people who have gone down this path try to not get to the end of it aren’t very plausible, right? I mentioned Rawls. I mentioned Dworkin. We could have looked at some others I talk about in that piece, Jerry Cohen being one of them, but it doesn’t work. So you’re left with the fact that if you embrace the socialization of capacity strategy you’re going to get to a place that very few of us want to go to.

Now it’s actually even worse than that. It’s even more problematic than that because everything I’ve said to you so far presumes that in the absence of a justification for inequality, we should presume equality. After all, I said, “Why should somebody get more just because they work harder if the capacity to work is itself morally arbitrary,” right? That presumes that there’s some assumption that other things being equal we should all get the same.

But why assume that? Why assume that? We could just say, “Well, it’s not a divine plan, so some people are lucky and some people are unlucky.” There it is. “Losses must lie where they fall,” as a famous American judge once said. And gains should lie where they fall. And so you could get Nietzsche. We’ll hear a little bit more about Nietzsche when we read Alasdair MacIntyre next week. You could get the view that the strong win and it’s just the way it is, and asking moral questions about it is simply irrelevant.

Now Rawls thinks he has an answer to that, which is what I started with at the very beginning of the Rawls’s lectures, which was essentially — remember when we had the discussion of what’s the fair way to cut a cake. And one of you said, “Well, the fair way to cut a cake is to give the knife to the person who takes the last slice and then he will divide it equally, or she will divide it equally, presumption being the person wants to maximize the slice that they get, the residual slice, and the way you do that is to divide it equally.

But I made the point that that’s not really an argument for equality, right? That’s not a moral argument for equality. It’s not a moral argument for equality because it assumes what we want to get is equality and then you create the mechanism to generate that result. So if, for example, we added more information and we said, “Well, we know that the six people here waiting for the slice of cake one of them has three cakes at home, and one of them has nothing, and one of them is a diabetic.” As soon as you introduce information of that sort then it’s not obvious where you want to wind up is equality. And so saying to the person with the knife, “You get the last slice,” becomes problematic, right?

So all of this is only to make the point that the cake-cutting example does not establish the moral desirability of equality, on the contrary, it assumes you’ve decided equality’s where you want to end up and then you create a mechanism that generates it. And that’s the structure of what Rawls does in his theory of justice. He assumes that his principles are where we want to end up, and then he structures the choice situation to generate them.

But it means if you favor equality, or if you favor efficiency, or if you favor some other basis for distribution, you have to have an argument for it, some other argument for it other than just that it gets generated in this way. And to the extent Rawls has any argument at all, it’s this kind of prudence. This, “there but for fortune go I,” the grave risks. We better take care of the person at the bottom because it might turn out to be me. But as we saw, that assumes a view of risk that some people find irrationally conservative, and so we don’t really have a clear, clean-cut answer.

And so we don’t really have a very satisfying evolution of the workmanship ideal from Locke down through the present. It’s a theological argument. In Locke’s formulation it’s got this very nice coherent — it all fits together, but the moment you try to secularize it you’re left with this problem that it leads in the directions people are not going to want to go in, on the one hand. On the other hand they’re not going to want to get rid of it entirely either. And so the ways in which people try and hedge in the parade of horribles doesn’t entirely work and we’re left with this kind of nagging feeling that there’s got to be some way to salvage this workmanship idea, but we haven’t managed to do it.

And so, just as the evolution of science has taken us — or the evolution of the commitment to science has taken us to a rather uncomfortable endpoint when we get to the world of “political, not metaphysical,” so the evolution of the workmanship idea has taken us to a rather uncomfortable endpoint once we get to Rawls’s move and his attempt to limit the radical implications of it that he doesn’t like. And so we will pick up that story when we come to talk about the democratic tradition in the last few lectures of this course.

But before we get there we’re going to consider seriously the idea that maybe the whole Enlightenment project was a mistake. Maybe we should reject the whole Enlightenment venture. This was, of course, the view of Edmund Burke, the Irish political thinker that we’ll talk about on Wednesday, and it’s a long tradition from Burke down through the present. We’re going to look at Alasdair MacIntyre as a contemporary defender of this view, but this is the idea that we shouldn’t be surprised that the Enlightenment project turns out to be untenable because it was a profound and indeed politically dangerous mistake. We’ll start with that on Wednesday.

[end of transcript]

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